Using Old Words In News Ways: The Effect Of Argument Structure, Form Class And Affixation

Williams (1981) and others (e.g., Kiparsky 1983; Pinker & Prince 1987) have noted that new verbs which are semantically extended from nouns take the regular past-tense (as in the baseball sense of fly ), while verbs extended from an irregular verb inherit the irregular past-tense marker, as happens with compounding and affixation (e.g. oversleep ). This type of data has motivated the view that the mental lexicon is governed by abstract principles which are sensitive to formal grammatical categories such as noun and verb but not to the meaning of lexical items or the vicissitudes of their use. If only abstract principles can adequately describe morphological regularities, then it is reasonable to propose that notions such as lexical class, the root/affix distinction, and inheritance of feature markings are explicitly implemented as mental symbols in the language processing system (Marcus, Brinkmann, Clahsen, Wiese, Woest & Pinker 1993).